Even the thought of it can make you kind of tired. Try Simplified Strategic Planning: A No-Nonsense Guide for Busy People Who Want Results Fast! and The One Page Business Plan with CD-ROM for ideas on how to create a working document that's lean and brief.
What ideas do you have for strategic planning?
Prior to Hurricane Kat, a disaster for most business owners was a hard drive crash. By some estimates, of those businesses that will recover, most will be down for months rebuilding and recovering data.
What great tip do you have for when disaster strikes?
Elaine St. James' book Simplify Your Work Life : Ways to Change the Way You Work So You Have More Time to Live has lots of easy tips to help business owners and career professionals take much of the struggle and effort out of the day to day.
After you're read it, pick 3 items and work at them until they become habits.
Companies, to stay ahead of market pressures, are required to do more than change -- they're being forced to transform themselves to stay alive. In The Forgotten Half of Change, author de Brabandere challenges us to change not only our actions, but to fundamentally shift our thinking about what we do and why we think what we think.
This month, think about where your thinking and your outcomes just don't match. You might want to get to business meetings on time, but keep doing that one last thing before you walk out the door. Perhaps, you know you should have employee policies to set expectations and to protect your interests in case things go awry, but you still haven't gotten it done. What about the new sales calls you know you need to go on, but you can't get away from the office to get to your prospects or new clients?
Knowing the right thing to do isn't enough.
You know you need a business plan -- you do. But you don't have the time or the money to devote to creating a multi-page, bound document that you're not sure how to use. Business planning doesn't have to be tough. Use the power of the One Page Plan to create a simple, living document that you can use daily to plan your business efforts.
I started using the One Page Plan a year ago and it changed the way my business grew. I could carry my plan with me and, if an opportunity came that was inconsistent with my plan, I could easily steer clear and stay focused on my business. All of the extraneous material was gone.
Networking had been just that -- work -- for me until I learned several key facts. The top of the list is that the people in the room aren't interested in me, mostly at all. They're interested in themselves, their interests and their agenda. I didn't like it, but it was true. When I got dialed-into this fact of life and began working my net consistent with the true intentions of the people in the room, life got much easier and I began producing greater results. Later, as I got to learn more about each person, they let their guard down and became more open -- more consistent with who they were in the rest of their lives.
What are your networking frustrations and successes?
Are you functioning daily based on your core values and priorities? Heck, do you even have time to figure out what they are? Whether you're read the book of the month, First Things First, or not, feel free to happily weigh in on this timely subject (yeah, that was bad)!
Jim Collins' book, which follows on the success of his other work, Built to Last, focuses on the answer to this question: "Can a good company become a great company and if so, how does that happen."
You think about hiring someone to help, but get stopped by...what? The expense? Not knowing who or how to hire someone? Being unsure whether to contract it out or hire it in?
Write in your comments and have at it!
Email was designed to help speed communications. Where does email put a crimp in your productivity?
